December 13, 2025 • 65 mins
We discuss the wisdom that Aristotle called the "Charioteer of the virtues" without which all our other virtues would be "blind"...what it is, how it comes about and more...plus we touch on rationality in daily life and that slipperiest of all fishes, happiness...
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Episode Transcript
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(00:01):
A lot of people think that philosophy is useless, and I
understand it's got difficult languages.
It's got a lot of oblique arguments.
Seems a long like there's a longstory of going back and forth
and back and forth. Seems like might all just be a
waste of time. It turns out, though, there's
(00:21):
this kind of wisdom that the ancients used to talk about
that's we rarely hear about it today.
And you know, philosophy, normalphilosophy, comes from the two
Greek words, filial and Sophia, Sophia's wisdom.
But there's this other kind of wisdom and the wisdom, this
other kind of wisdom is called phronesis.
(00:42):
Aristotle talked about it. He said that it was the
charioteer of the virtues. He said that without it, all
your other virtues are blind. Aristotle flat out said you can
know every philosophy book ever written, have perfect logic, and
still be a clueless idiot in real life if you don't have
(01:03):
fromesis. So we talked about fromesis in
this dialogue, as always unscripted.
We also talked about reason and doesn't work the way we think it
does. We also talked about happiness
and science trying to understandand help us find a way to
happiness and and whether maybe science needs philosophy to help
(01:23):
help us do that. So welcome to this next episode
of Fools and Sages. Enjoy.
(01:45):
Good afternoon, Brian. How are you doing today, Sir?
I'm well, thanks. How are you?
I'm doing good. You mentioned it's getting
chillier in New Mexico. And it's crispy.
Sunny but crispy. Sunny and crispy, Yeah, that
crisp all weather cool. Well, we were talking just
before we hit record about some thoughts that you were having
(02:10):
about maybe I'm not sure what you called it exactly, but I
would say practical philosophy and A and a conversation you're
having with grok about it. Yeah, me and Grok and well, you
know, it came out of my re listening to our episode was
just dropped the day before this.
(02:32):
We're recording now, which was our episode with Doctor Lawrence
Shapiro, the world authority on a world authority on embodied
cognition. And but also, you know, we had
that conversation about the roleof philosophy and he was
specifically, you know, we're, we're all in the same, in the
(02:59):
same playing the same 1 spring banjo song, which is basically,
you know, more philosophy, more philosophy and more cowbell,
right? And so he was mostly focused on
the, the role of philosophy in not just informing science, but
(03:25):
in sort of contextualizing science, giving it a place to
start, helping it define terms, some of those fundamental ideas
that sometimes get presupposed. And so they sort of get glazed
over a little bit. And, and in, in listening to it,
I'm thinking about, well, you know, we're, we're overlapping
(03:48):
and we're bridging to a lot of academic philosophers.
And, but what we're actually at extracting from them is a little
bit different. And we've sort of touched on
this difference way, way back, Ithink when we talked about
(04:10):
Aristotle. You know, with Aristotle, we
have this, this old Greek idea of Sophia, Sophia being wisdom,
but it's wisdom in a in its in its timeless sense, in its
(04:30):
capital W dressing. So it's coming to conclusions
that, you know, that try to be final conclusions, you know,
they try to be absolute things that will stand through time.
And in fact, we refer to Aristotle a lot.
So a lot of a lot of the things that Aristotle has said, people
(04:54):
have found value through time. For example, of Moses Maimonides
referred to Aristotle as the philosopher.
This is one of the things that made him controversial.
But but the idea is that, you know, it may be in the Platonic
sense that we have these, these eternal truths that we're trying
(05:17):
to mine out. And that's all well and good as
far as it goes. But there's this other type of
wisdom that Aristotle mentioned and he used the, the term, the
Greek term phrenosis. And you know, there is this more
(05:42):
common modern idea that that reminds me of a book that was
written by a, by a doctor about doctors.
But the topic was on kitchen table wisdom.
And this idea of kitchen table wisdom is its wisdom that sort
of lives by the hearth. You know, it's wisdom that
(06:05):
sustains us in normal life. And that's why I think, you
know, as we as we in our conversation with and with
Doctor Shapiro, we sort of briefly touched on the
importance of meaning in general.
But meaning for the average person is much closer to this
kitchen table wisdom than it is to understanding the
(06:29):
implications of Wittgenstein or,you know, the subtleties of
Spinoza's gods or so. So we're really looking for, you
know, that's one of the reasons that I harp on the idea that
that we want to look at the things that all these
philosophers agreed on and not necessarily the differences that
(06:50):
they had. The differences in many cases
might be detail that's better left to experts.
Where's the big pieces? That's why I say, you know, I
kind of see myself at times as like a philosophical
carpetbagger. I want to go in and I want to
pry the big jewels out, put those in my bag and haul them
(07:15):
off. But I'm leaving a lot of the a
lot of the smaller, you know, things that that hopefully
people will follow their interest and go and mine some of
those when they appreciate the shininess of the big jewels that
came out of the those same pieces.
But you know, there's this idea of, of a type of wisdom or an
(07:36):
understanding, a grasp of life and meaning that enables us that
we can translate to the kitchen table.
And and that's this idea of phronesis, which is kind of gets
translated as knowing what to do.
(07:56):
And so in this conversation withGrok, I said, well, you know,
what would be the branch of philosophy that would address
that? I'm sure Grok's knowledge is
not, you know, exhaustive, entirely exhausted, but I but it
didn't come up with any particular established field.
And it's suggested instead that the name phrenetics or
(08:20):
phronesiology and the easyiology, you know, we know
theology that's the study of well, when we get into the
easyiology of the easier part makes the ology the study of a
condition or a process of right.So we know that from kinesiology
(08:43):
and anesthesiology. Well, so this would be basically
the study of the condition or the process of phronesis.
And in the conversation with with Grok about this, you know,
one of the things that I pointedout was that, you know, this
(09:05):
comes back to my popular banjos song about dispositional and,
and propositional knowledge is apropositional knowledge is much
more in the realm of Sophia, butdispositional knowledge is much
more in the realm of throneses. So that sort of plugs in.
And I think the same may be the case for what I like to call
(09:28):
ontological hermeneutics. I think one of the reasons that
academic philosophers are not likely to be interested in such
a thing is because the conclusions of it are all
personal. They're not necessarily
publishable, and as such they address more of the question,
(09:51):
what should I do rather than what is the timeless truth that
I can mine out of this, to put into the March of human
collective wisdom two different kind of paths.
Not that they're not unrelated though, right?
I mean, I would think that that the pursuit of Sophia
(10:16):
continually and and well, they inform one another, right?
Wisdom with a capital W might help us know what to do, and
that the the experience of doingwhat needs to be done might
yield yet greater wisdom. Yes, exactly.
(10:36):
In the way that a case law relates to the law itself, or
what we might call a clinical review, how a doctor applies the
principles of medicine to this particular patient.
And within medicine we see doctors that focus on
(11:00):
discovering new timeless truths.When this thing stops
functioning, then it causes thiscondition.
Or when we put this new factor in the context of this
condition, the condition resolves.
Or when we, and these are sort of things that should be
(11:22):
relevant to any patient to whom the basic premise applies.
And that's the kind of thing that gets written in a medical
book. But you'll never crack open a
medical book that will tell you,here's what you should do for
Joe, who you're going to see on Friday.
(11:43):
Maybe that's what our one of thehopes for AI is, is that it will
help people to bridge that from the body of disembodied
knowledge to the embodiment of this specific case scenario.
But so far, we've always relied on humans to do it, because
(12:05):
humans have always been the onesat the interface asking the
questions. Well, what should we do?
Because that's the question the doctor has to learn, right?
Has to come up with. Reminds me of the word
synthesis, right? Because or or praxis right?
The the the taking the theoretical to the practical is
(12:28):
a is a a process that we're always engaged in right in in
more and less explicit ways. Well, and it often shows up as
spanning this, the two realms ofthe mind body problem which we
(12:49):
spoke about with Doctor Shapiro.That is the thought what should
I do happens in the world of thought.
But the doing has to happen out here where we bang into stuff
and that becomes the the wheelwright of Chuang Tsu or the
(13:10):
butcher, or in fact I'm going tosay most if not all Taoist arts.
Can you say more about the Wheelwright and the Butcher
references? Yeah, You know, the Wheelwright
story is, is is. We made reference to it before
in our prior episodes. Listeners should listen to all
(13:33):
of our prior episodes to find that one.
Immediately. Oh, immediately blot out.
Blot out the time in your calendar.
It should only take you 3 days if you don't sleep.
But so, so it's a story in Chwansa where Duke Wan, I think
(13:55):
it is, is out on the on the patio.
And he's he's chilling, probablywith a refreshing beverage.
And he's reading an ancient text.
And the wheel right is out in the yard as they do, as they are
making wheels, as they do. And the wheelwright says to the
(14:18):
Duke, what you doing? And the Duke says, well, I'm
reading the wisdom of the ancients, you know, as us
aristocratic types are want to do.
And the wheelwright makes some kind of a comment that, you
know, that gets translated aboutsomething like you're just
(14:41):
leaving the, your, the traces that they left behind.
And I, and I have always suspected, I have no, no textual
evidence for it, but I've alwayssuspected that there was
reference to the, the poop that an animal leaves behind on the
trail that it's been walking on.The animal's gone.
This is just the poop that's left behind that tells us he was
(15:03):
here. And the reason I suspect that is
because the Duke takes offence to the common of the
wheelwright. He says you better explain
yourself and the wheelwrights aswell.
Let's take an example from my profession.
I'm 70 plus years old and I makewheels.
(15:28):
And now that I've been doing it for the greater part of my life,
I make good wheels. But to make a good wheel, if the
spokes are too narrow, then the wheel will be loose.
And if the spokes are too tight,then the wheel won't go
together, right? You know, And there's just a
(15:50):
host of these different issues that all have to be precise and
then you get a good wheel. But to do it is such is a thing
in your hands to do it is a thing that's so rooted in the
doing of it that I couldn't eventeach it to my own son.
He would have to go through and do it.
(16:12):
And and it in the same way was the wisdom of the ancients.
So sadly, when they died, their wisdom died with them.
Now we know that we have texts from these ancients and we know
that a lot of what comes from these ancients, you know, we
(16:33):
undeniably refer to as wisdom. So the type of wisdom that I
would infer that the wheelwrightis talking to is this phronesis.
And that is how these great sages took this body of
intellectual knowledge and relying on it, living out of it,
(16:57):
how they actually walked throughlife and what that looked like.
And that that, and one of the things that Grock and I started
talking about, which was relevant to the conversation was
apprenticeships. Because if, if the a wheelwright
(17:18):
is going to learn how to make a wheel, he might not be able to
learn it directly from the wheelwright, but he may be able
to apprentice with the wheelwright who may be able to
supplement and support his process of going through
attaining the phronesis for himself.
(17:39):
And I've said before that in craftsmanship, it isn't just
that you make this beautiful thing and you do it through the
whole, every step of the processand you don't screw it up.
It's that when the things that will inevitably happen that are
less than ideal because we're out here in the contingent
universe, when things go off thetrack, knowing what to do, which
(18:04):
is like the definition of phronesis is what separates the
master from The Apprentice. And that after you've done it so
many times that you've wrestled with all the things that can go
off the track and all the ways to prevent it from going off the
track and, or to get it back on the track when it goes off that
way, that's where you've attained your phronesis and now
(18:28):
you know what to do. And so that's the kind of wisdom
that dies with the master. You know, when I was a
Goldsmith, my teacher, my, my man that I apprenticed with, he
had an apprentice with a maestroin Italy.
And he said when he was in Italyhe was going around and he met a
guy who did a type of enameling called plicojure.
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And you know, most enameling, you have a little plate and you
put the little powdered glass onthere and you put it in the oven
and it melts the glass. And now you've got a little
metal plate with some nice colored glass melted into the
the little dish that the metal created.
But Plecasur, there's no bottom to that dish.
(19:17):
I don't even know how they do it, but the light goes through
'cause there's no bottom. And he said that this guy, this
maestro of Plecasur, could make a rose that if you held it out
at your hand, you could not tellthis was not a real rose until
you drill down on it. Now, the reason that I remember
(19:38):
this story is because he said that he immediately asked the
guy, do you have an apprentice that you're teaching this to?
And the master said, no, when I die, it dies with me.
It's like, wow, that's cold. You know, he could almost be a
Kung Fu master with that kind ofattitude, you know?
(20:02):
But there is this idea that suchthings aren't learned, but they
may be transmitted. If the vessel is sufficient to
the task, which is a tall order at times, you know.
And some masters are famous for not making it any easier.
(20:23):
Famous one is of Naropa or Mill Rapa rather.
Mill Rapa had a teacher named Marpa.
Marpa the translator. And Marpa put Mill Rapa through
hell before he gave him the transmission.
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And the story is that it was to remove all this bad karma, that
he couldn't be a fit vessel for the transmission until he
removed all the karma. And they say he would make him
build these towers out of stone,and then he'd come.
He'd say, you what? It wasn't supposed to be built
here. It was supposed to be built over
here. Take it down, Bill, you know,
And he was fed very little and his body was covered with sores.
(21:08):
And apparently Marpa's wife would take mercy on him and give
him a little extra food or some kind of thing.
And Marpa, don't do that. Don't do that.
You're just going to make it take longer.
You're just going to make him suffer longer, you know, turn
the screws, you know. But anyway, so there is this
always this story about the master maybe putting us through
changes to make us a fit vessel for the dispositional shift that
(21:34):
needs to happen for us to be able to actually use this piece
of disembodied knowledge to actually bring it here and now,
you know? I think I want to go back to
something you said earlier aboutour our interest in meaning.
(21:56):
And maybe maybe I I, I want to ask first about how we relate
meaning to these two types of philosophy, Sophia and and
phronesis or the pursuit of Sophia and phronesis.
(22:20):
I don't know what the equivalentis.
So Sophieces. So, so yeah, how does how do you
think meaning relates to each ofthose?
I think they're fundamentally different.
I think that Sophia is the stuffthat reason can grasp.
(22:43):
And for example, I always have akind of a reaction when I hear
people complaining, usually froma kind of an arrogant position
of, you know, with a certain condescension to their
communication about how, oh, nobody uses reason.
(23:07):
Everybody should be more reasonable, you know, as if to
proclaim themselves to be reason, reasonable, rational,
the rational animal. And there's, and there's, it's
been given a lot of, you know, alot of kudos, you know, and it
seems like, well, duh. Well, right, I mean, it's, it's
(23:28):
kind of like a, a Western enlightenment value and has
resulted in a lot of good things, right.
And so, so I think that blinds us to its limitations.
And and it maybe we like to assume that that's how we
operate. Those of us who've been educated
(23:49):
and got a degree of some sort, we think now we are reasonable.
But I think if you drill down onthe human behavior, there's some
problems with that. The biggest problem is, you
know, traditionally what do we look at as the paradigm of
reason? I would argue geometry, which is
why Euclidean geometry gets set out.
(24:11):
That's why Spinoza gave his ethics laid out like geometry.
That's why that mathematical model has been taken as the the
way to make logical argument andbut but again, geometry is of as
(24:32):
Bergsen argues is a very extremecase scenario because it is that
clear. And I think I, I mentioned this
with Doctor Shapiro, that for the average human who gets up in
the morning and has to go do allthe human stuff, we, the things
(24:58):
about which we can be certain isvery limited.
Most of the certain things we can be certain about are not
really that relevant. They're presupposed, you know,
we, we, we, we're whether they're regardless of how
(25:18):
certain they are, I'm going to go, my car's going to start, the
generator is going to start. I'm going to go do whatever I'm
going to do. But it turns out that as far as
the things that start to form the decisions that we make about
what we're going to do, there are all these uncertainties.
(25:41):
And we can't run pure analyticalsyllogisms and have our
decisions be purely rational. Unless we admit that this type
of reason that we're using is not going to be the extreme case
scenario of reason as it shows up in geometry, but much more of
(26:03):
a down and dirty in the trenchestype of reason that deals with
probabilities and not certainties.
And the way that shows up is this other term that that came
up with grok in our conversation.
And that term is heuristics. And so I would argue that not
(26:25):
only are most people not rational, most of the time that
if they tried to be, they just wouldn't get a lot done.
You can't be rigorously scientific about every decision
that you have to make in your life.
Sometimes you just got to get the kids to school, you got to
(26:45):
get food on the table. You have to work with big
probabilities and you're runningoff of rules of thumb.
And sometimes those those rules of thumb run us afoul, but often
they're based on what I would argue are translogical
(27:10):
conclusions. And I say translogical because I
think they fall out of, they fall out of pattern recognition
combined with that sense that I've referred to before of that
human brain sense of coherence. And so our faculty works on
(27:36):
pattern and coherence in a way that generates us a tendency
towards certain rules of thumb at certain times.
And I don't think you're going to model that reasonably.
I I mean, unless you allow for this probability based reason
(27:58):
and you realize that your absolute reason only operates
with absolute facts. If your facts aren't absolute,
your reason gets fuzzier from there.
The more interpretive based yourfacts are, the more interpretive
base will be. You're translating your solution
(28:19):
into action in reality. And that's why I like to argue
that all our analytics happen ina context of interpretation.
We interpreted the problem to topose it analytically, and then
we interpreted the analytical solution to put it back into
reality. I got stuck a little bit on the
(28:43):
idea that Sophia or or the pursuit of wisdom satisfies the
rational faculties because I I think of the pursuit of wisdom
in some way also satisfying let's say psychological and
(29:06):
spiritual needs also. Well, I think that wisdom, yes,
but rational thought or reason no.
I think reason is based on. I thought you equated the the
Sophia. The Sofia is Time is timeless.
(29:28):
I don't think it needs to be scientifically verifiable.
I think it just needs to fit everyone at every time, more or
less. Maybe not even everyone, maybe
just have a certain universality, but I think it
could be a intangible, you know,it could be the truth behind
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, but I don't think you could call
(29:56):
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony purely rational.
I think that was the argument of, of Gerta and the Sherman
Drong people and every, everything that reacts against
rationalism says, well, there's meaning that goes, there's
meaning that goes beyond the territory of, of reason and
rational thought. Yeah, I, I studied music theory
(30:21):
in college and we analyzed pieces of music like that.
I don't think we did Beethoven'sFifth Symphony, but, but, but we
did other stuff like that. And at at no point did the
analysis attempt to answer what was great about the piece.
There was a lot of like what wasinteresting about it and what
(30:43):
was new or innovative about it and what was similar about it to
other forms and other other waysof using harmony and dissonance.
All of all of which questions are accessible by reason.
Yeah, right. But what we're after is it
should start to sound familiar to some folks.
(31:04):
What we're after is the qualia, right?
This is another version of the mind body problem.
How does the vibration in my earsteer my mind?
Why do some songs make me feel nostalgic and other songs make
me feel nationalistic and other songs just make me feel sad?
(31:24):
Well, that's, I mean, we're talking about vibrations in a
Sonic medium that hit the timpani and that that create an
electric and then, but then somewhere it translates into the
mind dimension and and we have that if we have that hard
problem back at us again. And yeah.
(31:46):
You want to go back to relating meaning to phronesis now because
you you talked about how it relates to Sophia, but I
wondered if you wanted to say more on the other Rd.
Well, I think that I think that phronesis is about that human
(32:07):
function of judgement. And I think that the root of
this is tangled up with my personal attitudes about free
will, You know, given all the different qualifications of of
how one defines that. And somewhere in that murky in
(32:30):
between zone of compatibilism, Ifind still a role for
significant free will. I'm surprised you're putting it
that mildly. Well, I, I I'm putting it that
mildly, because, you know, I've been also reading Cropotkin
lately and he's been disappointing me.
(32:54):
There, I said it. I expected better.
Awfully. Sort of, you know, it's
assumptions about human nature that I think a lot of us have
already experienced to not be true and making me wonder, well,
(33:17):
what was his experience like? And, and it seems like in some
sense he, he contradicts himselfby having, attributing to humans
diverse qualities or lacks of qualities based on his
convenience. And, but, but the root idea is
that there was this idea behind communism that is still there.
(33:43):
And that is that if the external, and this is because
they're materialists, OK, If theexternal circumstances were
right, then humans would act like angels.
It's like, yeah. But look at the people for whom
there's no material issues at all.
(34:04):
They act far from angels, but they're capitalists.
So. Yeah.
Yeah. But don't think that if we take,
and this is like Eddie Murphy's Trading places, right?
Don't think that if the places aren't traded, anybody won't act
like a capitalist or act like, you know what the other like
(34:25):
there. It says so.
So. But the idea is that for humans
to exhibit free will in spite ofall that stuff, some development
has to take place. They must have gone through
moral development to become ChunSU.
If we use Confucius terms like you have to win your free will.
(34:49):
That's interesting. That's a different approach to
free will than what I thought we've talked about before.
And if that's the case, no blame.
I mean, but, but we talked aboutfree will arising from the very
initiation of let's say the hermeneutical process, right?
(35:14):
The the asking the question of of you know, what is this?
Who am I? You know any any any of that
like the attempt before? That I would say that even
Husserl when he talks about thisidea of intentionality, that's
at the very beginning of consciousness, at the formation
(35:37):
of the eye, that some aspect of free will is manifested in
moving towards the universe fromthe inner world.
That that's what why the baby reaches out.
I would say people tell them that's instinct.
I'd say, well then that amount of free will is instinctive, but
(35:59):
it's a developmental capacity ismy point, I guess.
So that you could say, yeah, anyhuman being has a rudimentary
capacities for free will, but that to develop that through the
stage of consciousness, conscious of consciousness as
we've referred to, that some effort must be exerted.
(36:20):
And that's one of the things that I think the the
philosophers agree on. I think Aristotle agrees on
that. I think Confucius agrees on
that. And that and, and some of them
tell you quite unabashedly, you're going to need an exemplar
for this or what Grok started calling a pronemus the in that
(36:50):
teach or a phronemus in that phronesis is different than
normal learning where you have ateacher.
The the teacher of phronesis hasto be an exemplar.
They have to be running the process for you to absorb it in
(37:11):
a certain way. And that's we, we use, try to
use the word transmission, but it's, it's involved with them
manifesting the disposition thatthat dispositional knowledge is
based on the Zen archery master.He's got to be able to pick up
the bow and hit the target right.
(37:32):
And so, so, so that that idea that there is a developmental
process there and that we win our free will just like we win
our consciousness of our consciousness.
It's certainly within our capacity, I guess to not develop
that, although maybe maybe there's a question there.
(37:55):
I would say that there is a typeof gravitation maybe that pulls
us to that, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have to be
developed. It's within your capacity to
walk, but you still had to fall on your ass a lot in your face a
few times, and you still had to,you know, stretch those wings
before you could just fly. That's, that's another example
(38:18):
of compatibilism, which I which I think is doing a lot of heavy
lifting in our cognitive model. And so I'm glad that we're
starting to use that word and refer to it because like another
way of thinking about compatibilism is that we have
these paradoxes like, like we have to develop free will, but
(38:44):
there's also gravity behind it. Or, or all of the material
aspects that contribute to free will or, or contribute to our
decisions negate the idea of free will.
And yet the immaterial aspects of free will might support it or
(39:12):
demonstrate it or, or illustrateit.
So, so yeah, I'm kind of thinking that like how we work
with these paradoxes is compatibilism.
Yep. And, and, and that's going to
have to be my, a component of myanswer to Professor Wolf also
(39:38):
about how could synchronicity exist in a material world.
I, I think the answer is they'recompatible because they, well,
I, I won't say because they're compatible and I'll finish that
thought another time. So so I'm I just want to wanted
to comment on. Compatibility.
(39:59):
Now see, I always think of and what you were talking about, I
always think of or not always, but I often think of the baby
bird. And I think I've seen some of
these nature shows, you know, David Attenborough and and
there's the baby Raptor of some kind and he's standing on the
edge. And of course, his parents have
(40:19):
built this nest. Not where there's a nice easy
walking trail nearby. They built it on this friggin
Cliff. So his first step out of his
nest is, you know, he's never flown.
He's up on this Cliff. It's hard for me to believe that
(40:40):
within his little bird experience, at some point he
just has to exert. I have to call it free will when
he jumps because you can see he's wrestling with it.
It does not seem like a good idea and yet he jumps.
(41:00):
Now some would argue that that'sexactly shows there wasn't free
will there, but I would argue hewouldn't have paused and looked
down and gulped the way he did if he didn't have to have some
free will involved. But life.
Will an argument against free will.
And but that life won't go on without him leaping.
(41:22):
Yeah, right. His life as an eagle or as a
whatever. But he he won't ever soar if he
doesn't leap. And yes, it is within his
Aristotelian and Teleki what it is to be him is to soar.
But I still argue that relies onhim exerting his free will to be
(41:43):
a one of those. And that there, that's that
glove meets hand nature. So yes, it's nature's will, but
it's nature's will that it be his will.
Yeah, right. Yeah.
So anyway, I always think that'sa great little example.
That explanation, and it's it's fractal nature resonates just
(42:06):
because meaning nested in meaning nested in meaning is I
guess, my subjective experience of what we're dealing with here.
Yeah. I mean, that's what it feels
like. So that yes, it's about your
personal expression, and it's about your personal expression
(42:27):
being the expression that the universal mind was thinking when
it thought you up. Yeah, basically what Spinoza was
saying about the the human, you know, the individual human
freedom is an expression of nature and and human happiness
(42:55):
results from alignment between the expression and what what
nature might want expressed most.
And I, and I think he was in thenot free will camp Despite that.
Right. Yeah, yeah.
And and again, that word happiness, that's a trouble.
(43:16):
Term. Well, that was my topic for
today. So maybe that segue because I
was. Thinking a duck come down now,
yeah. Yeah, right.
So, so we talked with Professor Larry about kind of his focus on
on three big questions, consciousness, free will and
(43:38):
happiness. And when we were talking about
it, I had this sense of like oneof these things is not like the
other. And, and I've been thinking
about what was it about happiness that felt
categorically different to me than the other two.
And I think it was that there's not 2 camps about happiness.
It's not like, well, free will or not free will or one nests in
(44:01):
the other and it's turtles all the way down or and, and
consciousness either arises frommatter or matter arises from
consciousness. But there's kind of like these
binaries. Happiness is like this whole
different thing. Oh my God, You've got the
chocolate people, you've got thetrout fishermen, you've got the
(44:22):
skydivers. I mean, wow.
Yeah, and you've got Spinoza andAristotle and.
Schopenhauer. Who's going to probably say
there is no such thing? I don't know.
It's one of those, yeah. So so yeah, I mean, I I was, I
(44:42):
was going to kind of float that difference past you and and just
say, you know, this, this strikes me as a fundamentally
different question. Where where free will and and
consciousness we can think abouta lot.
Ultimately we're going to pick aside.
Maybe we'll switch sides, whatever, but it's but happiness
is like this thing to maybe perpetually unpack, you know?
(45:09):
Well, you can answer the questions on consciousness and
free will, and if you can get a good answer, you can pack it
right into the realm of Sophia. And that's what we're trying to
do. Which is why they always want to
publish, right? And when you publish, it's very
important that if people can argue and disprove you, if it's
falsifiable and all that stuff. But happiness?
(45:32):
Happiness is phonetic, baby. Yeah, yeah.
It makes sense that it would have come up in this
conversation. Because when people ask you,
when people are pursuing happiness, what do they want to
know? What do I do?
Well, that's where the rubber meets the road.
Always. When it comes down to what do I
(45:52):
do, they don't really. You don't help them much if you
just give them a definition of happiness, unless it's got some
instructions that go along with it.
Maybe let's start this by following the meaning thread and
the relationship between happiness and meaning.
And, and there's a debate that goes on in my household about
(46:15):
the relative merits of non attachment versus intensive
attachment and how how meaning might result from loving people
and grieving people and maybe even loving ideas and and
curiosity or, you know, but but like being attached to phronesis
(46:40):
to doing in some way. And non attachment maybe relates
through phronesis, meaning to Sophia.
By practicing non attachment, weattain the higher principles,
(47:01):
but we have to practice, we haveto do to to get there.
So there's like a a little complexity.
Because I think that that's where this idea of controlled
folly comes in. It's because, you know, we want
to act as if it all matters, while remaining confident that
whatever happens, it all works out in the end.
(47:24):
We talked about living with passion, living without passion,
right? Right.
Yeah. And that and that, you know, and
also that at some level, you know, I think when we were
talking about Ibn al Farabi, we were talking about this idea
that when act, when accurately perceived, even punishment is
(47:48):
sweet. Yeah.
And meaning, meaning not corporeal punishment in the
contingent world, but even cosmic punishment for at the
hand of the creator is still sweet.
And you know, which is in the, in the yogic traditions, they
will sometimes say that, you know, if you're really seeing
things on the highest level, what you're seeing is, is called
(48:12):
Satchit Ananda, which is being consciousness bliss, you know,
which is that, you know, I wouldargue this is the direction of
Spinoza's sub eternitatus, you know, subspecies eternitatus,
that you're seeing things from the, from the God's eye view.
(48:34):
You know which, which I mean, we've, we've talked about this
and we've seen different people try to approach that idea of
leaving our personal perspectivebehind.
Whether it's a phenomenologist saying we have to bracket or
it's Jane Cox saying you got to pull your foot up from the nail
or it's the Buddhist saying the great way is not difficult for
(48:58):
those who do not pick and choose.
So there is this. And this is, you know, probably
where the Zen Master should hit you with a stick.
Because, yeah, you do operate asif it matters within a setting
of knowing that everything is fine and nothing really matters.
(49:24):
Just like Queen tells us today'sRock'n'roll reference.
I thought it was going to be making this is a warm gun.
I I was waiting like we got the chocolate people, we got the
gun, warm gun people. OK, yeah, no, I was it to the
end of after using the warm gun,right?
And Mama just killed a man. Queen reference.
(49:46):
Yeah. And then I that's the way it
ends, right? Nothing really matters.
And and that's what that's what,that's what Krishna tells Arjuna
in some level that, you know, the Slayer who thinks he is
slain is mistaken and the slayeewho thinks he has been slain is
also mistaken. And that and that's this idea of
(50:10):
that what's really happening here is a theater of mind and
that the real process. And we've had philosophers now I
think from both sides of this argument saying that what's
really going on here is mind andothers saying no, it's really
going on here is matter. And we haven't actually done the
(50:33):
bear and bull baiting with them.You know that old British sport
where you chain a bear to a bulland then you bet, right.
But those are two major as we'veas we come back regularly to
those are the two major ideas. And so so yeah, I mean, where do
(50:54):
we go with that? It always comes down to me to
what do we do? But I'm a pragmatic American.
Well, let's go back to let's go back to happiness.
Up about certainty so with so with happiness, I mean, to me
the idea of that we're going to strive for scientific certainty
around the topic of happiness. It has has its own philosophical
(51:17):
issues written right into the script.
See for me, happiness is is A2 dimensional mapping is it's not
even it would be like saying this is the map of Norway and
giving you a rectangle. We've really had to lose a lot
of detail here, like all of it. I'm not even sure what that
(51:42):
rectangle would comprise, because again, to your point,
there's the chocolate people andthen there's the like the.
Well, there's the hedonists. Yeah, and.
There's the idealists. And, and we'd like to believe
that there's, or I would like tobelieve, I guess that there's a
(52:03):
difference in quality between the happiness that each of these
groups is experiencing. Not that well, that's.
Reprising Aristotle, Aristotle went ran through them and came
away with this idea that, you know, we want to generate the
the good life. And I guess as much as I sort of
(52:24):
repel the idea in this sense, I guess I am kind of Aristotelian,
because I do think that your ultimate, when I translate
happiness, I want to make a capital H, I want it to be
cosmic. I don't just want you to get a
good brownie every once in a while and say that's happiness.
(52:46):
That's too low a bar for me. I want to say that that
happiness, as in capital H, happiness is in the fulfillment
of what it is to be you. And that's frenetic.
You're going to have to go through a lifetime of warmer,
(53:07):
warmer, cooler, cooler. I think I got this piece.
OK. What's the next piece?
Warmer, warmer, cooler, cool. Damn.
You know, like, there's a whole soundtrack to that, that that is
a it is a here. There's a word in here,
(53:29):
phonetogenic. How's that?
Phronesis with the the generate the generative component
phronogenic process that's better than a chronosyn classic
(53:50):
infundibulum. Yeah.
So, so I mean, so that refers tothe act of doing, informing the
quality of doing. It's kind of it's like applying
A hermeneutical process to doing.
And that's the warmer, warmer, colder, colder.
Back to the whole, Look at the part.
(54:11):
Back to the whole, look at the part.
Get a whole new piece. Have to re update the whole
picture of the whole. Maybe it's not about Pokémon,
right? I mean, this is a stage of
development. I haven't tried that.
I don't know, maybe right. I've tried chocolate.
(54:32):
There was a hard there was a time in my household where
Charizard was a was a a thing that wielded a certain amount of
mental leverage. I, I, I remember those days in
your house. I when that was going on in my
house, I turned the hearing aid all the way down.
(54:52):
I yeah, I I just didn't understand I.
I understand that. So.
Although Charizard's kind of cool you.
Know maybe maybe ending on a personal note because it might,
might be useful. And I'm wondering, maybe I want
to ask you, like, how has your relationship to happiness
(55:17):
changed through your own Frodo Genesis from No Genesis?
Yeah, I would say that I'm relating a lot more to that,
that musician who was in his 90sand he was still practicing
every day and they asked him whyand he said because he's still
(55:39):
making progress. That for me, in the broadest
sense, happiness is tied up withthis idea of making progress.
You know, there's this, there's this Chinese saying that I can't
remember the Chinese, but it basically says that, you know,
(56:00):
you have your place on the horizon where you're headed, but
you're stepping over the branch that's laying across your path
at your feet. And so, and to me, that's like
the piece of the whole referencealso, where am I going?
What am I doing today to get there?
And maybe I don't see the place on the horizon.
(56:24):
Maybe that's part of what's achieved by stepping over the
things, you know, because this is that meeting of the two
worlds. I'm, I'm in the contingent world
of bathrooms and restaurants as Yoshi Sasaki Roshi would say.
But the thing that I'm after is really kind of transcendent,
(56:47):
meaning that it's not going to happen as a result of the stuff
that you see and can bang into in the contingent world.
It's going to happen through it.Like the like the pre birth
world shines through the post birth world, like 1's soul
(57:07):
shines through one's body. So, so, so I think that's the
way that I've related it and, and it's changed.
It's really changed over the years.
So for example, I, like many people, did feel that there were
certain things that I needed to be happy.
(57:30):
And then, like many people, I realized that there was very
little likelihood of me attaining some of those things,
and so I best not define happiness in terms of those.
(57:50):
I'm I'm thinking of Jordan Peterson's Clean Your Room as a
kind of parallel philosophy. Well, there is something to
attaining a state of balance andI think it's particularly
(58:11):
challenging in this world. And that that balance shows up a
bunch of different ways. It shows up in, you know, some
of the important ways are how your time is spent.
So for example, I've been thinking lately about different
(58:35):
people's lives being mixes of social interaction and solitude,
because I'm somebody that has more of the solitude end of the
spectrum than I think the average person.
And to me, it's quite clear the price that's paid for that.
(58:57):
So for me, an important part of my happiness, in fact a part of
me becoming who I am, I had a ona better level relied on me
being able to tune that because too much of A social environment
would not allow me to go throughthe process that I needed to go
(59:19):
through to manifest aspects of myself that seemed to want to
unfold like that. And so, you know, there is this
idea maybe that if people are inthis hermetic, you know,
direction, that there is a misogyny behind that or a
(59:41):
misanthropy behind it or a rejection of the world because
of its contamination. And I, and I think that it's
maybe you could say that there'ssome of the, you know, the
Taoists or the, the, the, the Buddhists sometimes refer to
that as the worrying of the cicadas is the buzz of the, of
(01:00:04):
the world of social interaction and, you know, constant
interplay. And that is what hermits are
typically getting away from, butthey're not that That isn't the
primary motivation. It isn't that that's bad in
(01:00:24):
itself, it's just that that obstructs the process of this
other thing that is a positive motivation.
So it's like at Christmas when you open up a present, it's not
that the paper is bad that it was wrapped in, but you still
want to get the paper off of there because it's it's in the
(01:00:46):
way of the thing. So value judgement about the
paper. It served its purpose Maybe, but
but it's in the way of the thingright now.
Well, and and as someone who whois likewise inclined towards
solitude, just to just to put put a finer point on it, there
(01:01:09):
is a balance and that balance isdifferent for different people.
And different chapters. And and a different chapters and
and. Some people really derive great
meaning from their social interactions, and the expression
of parts of themselves occurs through that more than through
(01:01:31):
solitude. Yep, Yep, and it's different
through different chapters. Very much so.
None of this applied to me in myearlier chapters, and sometimes
just for purely logistical reasons, but but often it had to
do because my mental process wasvery much involved with the
(01:01:52):
collective. And now it's more removed from
that which which I think is a process of age that comes along
with the perspective that comes with age.
And you realize how certain motivating influences were very
much chapter based and that it'sOK to be motivated.
(01:02:14):
In fact, you see people that arestill motivated by those things
from that chapter, and it feels a little wrong somehow, a little
misfitting to still be motivatedabout those things that were so
clearly from previous chapters. I think we can all think of
those, you know, without me having to draw the bloody
(01:02:35):
details. Yeah, But you know, it also has
to do with, I think I we talked about this before.
It's like, how is your life going to graph out?
Are you on a curve that peaks early and then does the slow
slide all the way down? Are you on the curve that, you
(01:02:55):
know, peak somewhere in the middle, holds it for a while and
then slides down? Or are you on the curve that
just builds and builds and builds and builds so that at 90
you're still making progress? Did you ever see that video of
Kurt Vonnegut talking about the basic story arcs that you can
use as an author? Oh, no.
(01:03:17):
But it sounds familiar. It's brilliant.
Oh. And you're reminding me of it.
Those are like the three options.
Oh, oh, interesting. Interesting because because in
life those are really the options.
And we have plenty of people outthere as paradigms of all three,
I think, but unfortunately less of the third.
(01:03:40):
I think the one that's up and tothe right might be the one that
he says don't write that story. It's boring, right?
It's like to great life. It's not a good book.
I think. If I remember correctly.
Where you just where it just slowly builds and builds and
builds and builds. Yeah, I think that's right.
I think those the stories all come after the posthumously.
(01:04:03):
Yeah, yeah, it's the opposite ofJames Dean.
Yeah, sure. Yeah, cool.
Well, maybe let's leave it there.
I, I think we'll come back to phronogenesis that I, we, we
might need something a little catchier, but yeah.
Reminds me of so far. We've got Phronymos for the
(01:04:25):
person that is. The album name, you know.
Really. And phronetics, which is, you
know, I searched that, there's nothing there.
He'd always gets mistaken for phonetics, phonisiology as the
(01:04:46):
pedagogy of phonet of phonisis. And I don't know, maybe I'll.
Maybe I'll pester grok and see if it has some other good terms
it can cook up for us. We better buy some domain names
before this episode releases. Oh, there we go.
(01:05:09):
Cool. Thanks, Brian.
Sounds good. See everybody next time.
Oh, I did want to say we crossedthe line for 80 subscribers at
the time of recording this. So that leaves us only 990.
Wow, wow, you do the math. But anyway, we love you all,
every one of you. Keep it up.
(01:05:30):
Thank you. Bye bye.
A lot of people think that philosophy is useless, and I
understand it's got difficult languages.
It's got a lot of oblique arguments.
Seems a long like there's a longstory of going back and forth
and back and forth. Seems like might all just be a
waste of time. It turns out, though, there's
(00:21):
this kind of wisdom that the ancients used to talk about
that's we rarely hear about it today.
And you know, philosophy, normalphilosophy, comes from the two
Greek words, filial and Sophia, Sophia's wisdom.
But there's this other kind of wisdom and the wisdom, this
other kind of wisdom is called phronesis.
(00:42):
Aristotle talked about it. He said that it was the
charioteer of the virtues. He said that without it, all
your other virtues are blind. Aristotle flat out said you can
know every philosophy book ever written, have perfect logic, and
still be a clueless idiot in real life if you don't have
(01:03):
fromesis. So we talked about fromesis in
this dialogue, as always unscripted.
We also talked about reason and doesn't work the way we think it
does. We also talked about happiness
and science trying to understandand help us find a way to
happiness and and whether maybe science needs philosophy to help
(01:23):
help us do that. So welcome to this next episode
of Fools and Sages. Enjoy.
(01:45):
Good afternoon, Brian. How are you doing today, Sir?
I'm well, thanks. How are you?
I'm doing good. You mentioned it's getting
chillier in New Mexico. And it's crispy.
Sunny but crispy. Sunny and crispy, Yeah, that
crisp all weather cool. Well, we were talking just
before we hit record about some thoughts that you were having
(02:10):
about maybe I'm not sure what you called it exactly, but I
would say practical philosophy and A and a conversation you're
having with grok about it. Yeah, me and Grok and well, you
know, it came out of my re listening to our episode was
just dropped the day before this.
(02:32):
We're recording now, which was our episode with Doctor Lawrence
Shapiro, the world authority on a world authority on embodied
cognition. And but also, you know, we had
that conversation about the roleof philosophy and he was
specifically, you know, we're, we're all in the same, in the
(02:59):
same playing the same 1 spring banjo song, which is basically,
you know, more philosophy, more philosophy and more cowbell,
right? And so he was mostly focused on
the, the role of philosophy in not just informing science, but
(03:25):
in sort of contextualizing science, giving it a place to
start, helping it define terms, some of those fundamental ideas
that sometimes get presupposed. And so they sort of get glazed
over a little bit. And, and in, in listening to it,
I'm thinking about, well, you know, we're, we're overlapping
(03:48):
and we're bridging to a lot of academic philosophers.
And, but what we're actually at extracting from them is a little
bit different. And we've sort of touched on
this difference way, way back, Ithink when we talked about
(04:10):
Aristotle. You know, with Aristotle, we
have this, this old Greek idea of Sophia, Sophia being wisdom,
but it's wisdom in a in its in its timeless sense, in its
(04:30):
capital W dressing. So it's coming to conclusions
that, you know, that try to be final conclusions, you know,
they try to be absolute things that will stand through time.
And in fact, we refer to Aristotle a lot.
So a lot of a lot of the things that Aristotle has said, people
(04:54):
have found value through time. For example, of Moses Maimonides
referred to Aristotle as the philosopher.
This is one of the things that made him controversial.
But but the idea is that, you know, it may be in the Platonic
sense that we have these, these eternal truths that we're trying
(05:17):
to mine out. And that's all well and good as
far as it goes. But there's this other type of
wisdom that Aristotle mentioned and he used the, the term, the
Greek term phrenosis. And you know, there is this more
(05:42):
common modern idea that that reminds me of a book that was
written by a, by a doctor about doctors.
But the topic was on kitchen table wisdom.
And this idea of kitchen table wisdom is its wisdom that sort
of lives by the hearth. You know, it's wisdom that
(06:05):
sustains us in normal life. And that's why I think, you
know, as we as we in our conversation with and with
Doctor Shapiro, we sort of briefly touched on the
importance of meaning in general.
But meaning for the average person is much closer to this
kitchen table wisdom than it is to understanding the
(06:29):
implications of Wittgenstein or,you know, the subtleties of
Spinoza's gods or so. So we're really looking for, you
know, that's one of the reasons that I harp on the idea that
that we want to look at the things that all these
philosophers agreed on and not necessarily the differences that
(06:50):
they had. The differences in many cases
might be detail that's better left to experts.
Where's the big pieces? That's why I say, you know, I
kind of see myself at times as like a philosophical
carpetbagger. I want to go in and I want to
pry the big jewels out, put those in my bag and haul them
(07:15):
off. But I'm leaving a lot of the a
lot of the smaller, you know, things that that hopefully
people will follow their interest and go and mine some of
those when they appreciate the shininess of the big jewels that
came out of the those same pieces.
But you know, there's this idea of, of a type of wisdom or an
(07:36):
understanding, a grasp of life and meaning that enables us that
we can translate to the kitchen table.
And and that's this idea of phronesis, which is kind of gets
translated as knowing what to do.
(07:56):
And so in this conversation withGrok, I said, well, you know,
what would be the branch of philosophy that would address
that? I'm sure Grok's knowledge is
not, you know, exhaustive, entirely exhausted, but I but it
didn't come up with any particular established field.
And it's suggested instead that the name phrenetics or
(08:20):
phronesiology and the easyiology, you know, we know
theology that's the study of well, when we get into the
easyiology of the easier part makes the ology the study of a
condition or a process of right.So we know that from kinesiology
(08:43):
and anesthesiology. Well, so this would be basically
the study of the condition or the process of phronesis.
And in the conversation with with Grok about this, you know,
one of the things that I pointedout was that, you know, this
(09:05):
comes back to my popular banjos song about dispositional and,
and propositional knowledge is apropositional knowledge is much
more in the realm of Sophia, butdispositional knowledge is much
more in the realm of throneses. So that sort of plugs in.
And I think the same may be the case for what I like to call
(09:28):
ontological hermeneutics. I think one of the reasons that
academic philosophers are not likely to be interested in such
a thing is because the conclusions of it are all
personal. They're not necessarily
publishable, and as such they address more of the question,
(09:51):
what should I do rather than what is the timeless truth that
I can mine out of this, to put into the March of human
collective wisdom two different kind of paths.
Not that they're not unrelated though, right?
I mean, I would think that that the pursuit of Sophia
(10:16):
continually and and well, they inform one another, right?
Wisdom with a capital W might help us know what to do, and
that the the experience of doingwhat needs to be done might
yield yet greater wisdom. Yes, exactly.
(10:36):
In the way that a case law relates to the law itself, or
what we might call a clinical review, how a doctor applies the
principles of medicine to this particular patient.
And within medicine we see doctors that focus on
(11:00):
discovering new timeless truths.When this thing stops
functioning, then it causes thiscondition.
Or when we put this new factor in the context of this
condition, the condition resolves.
Or when we, and these are sort of things that should be
(11:22):
relevant to any patient to whom the basic premise applies.
And that's the kind of thing that gets written in a medical
book. But you'll never crack open a
medical book that will tell you,here's what you should do for
Joe, who you're going to see on Friday.
(11:43):
Maybe that's what our one of thehopes for AI is, is that it will
help people to bridge that from the body of disembodied
knowledge to the embodiment of this specific case scenario.
But so far, we've always relied on humans to do it, because
(12:05):
humans have always been the onesat the interface asking the
questions. Well, what should we do?
Because that's the question the doctor has to learn, right?
Has to come up with. Reminds me of the word
synthesis, right? Because or or praxis right?
The the the taking the theoretical to the practical is
(12:28):
a is a a process that we're always engaged in right in in
more and less explicit ways. Well, and it often shows up as
spanning this, the two realms ofthe mind body problem which we
(12:49):
spoke about with Doctor Shapiro.That is the thought what should
I do happens in the world of thought.
But the doing has to happen out here where we bang into stuff
and that becomes the the wheelwright of Chuang Tsu or the
(13:10):
butcher, or in fact I'm going tosay most if not all Taoist arts.
Can you say more about the Wheelwright and the Butcher
references? Yeah, You know, the Wheelwright
story is, is is. We made reference to it before
in our prior episodes. Listeners should listen to all
(13:33):
of our prior episodes to find that one.
Immediately. Oh, immediately blot out.
Blot out the time in your calendar.
It should only take you 3 days if you don't sleep.
But so, so it's a story in Chwansa where Duke Wan, I think
(13:55):
it is, is out on the on the patio.
And he's he's chilling, probablywith a refreshing beverage.
And he's reading an ancient text.
And the wheel right is out in the yard as they do, as they are
making wheels, as they do. And the wheelwright says to the
(14:18):
Duke, what you doing? And the Duke says, well, I'm
reading the wisdom of the ancients, you know, as us
aristocratic types are want to do.
And the wheelwright makes some kind of a comment that, you
know, that gets translated aboutsomething like you're just
(14:41):
leaving the, your, the traces that they left behind.
And I, and I have always suspected, I have no, no textual
evidence for it, but I've alwayssuspected that there was
reference to the, the poop that an animal leaves behind on the
trail that it's been walking on.The animal's gone.
This is just the poop that's left behind that tells us he was
(15:03):
here. And the reason I suspect that is
because the Duke takes offence to the common of the
wheelwright. He says you better explain
yourself and the wheelwrights aswell.
Let's take an example from my profession.
I'm 70 plus years old and I makewheels.
(15:28):
And now that I've been doing it for the greater part of my life,
I make good wheels. But to make a good wheel, if the
spokes are too narrow, then the wheel will be loose.
And if the spokes are too tight,then the wheel won't go
together, right? You know, And there's just a
(15:50):
host of these different issues that all have to be precise and
then you get a good wheel. But to do it is such is a thing
in your hands to do it is a thing that's so rooted in the
doing of it that I couldn't eventeach it to my own son.
He would have to go through and do it.
(16:12):
And and it in the same way was the wisdom of the ancients.
So sadly, when they died, their wisdom died with them.
Now we know that we have texts from these ancients and we know
that a lot of what comes from these ancients, you know, we
(16:33):
undeniably refer to as wisdom. So the type of wisdom that I
would infer that the wheelwrightis talking to is this phronesis.
And that is how these great sages took this body of
intellectual knowledge and relying on it, living out of it,
(16:57):
how they actually walked throughlife and what that looked like.
And that that, and one of the things that Grock and I started
talking about, which was relevant to the conversation was
apprenticeships. Because if, if the a wheelwright
(17:18):
is going to learn how to make a wheel, he might not be able to
learn it directly from the wheelwright, but he may be able
to apprentice with the wheelwright who may be able to
supplement and support his process of going through
attaining the phronesis for himself.
(17:39):
And I've said before that in craftsmanship, it isn't just
that you make this beautiful thing and you do it through the
whole, every step of the processand you don't screw it up.
It's that when the things that will inevitably happen that are
less than ideal because we're out here in the contingent
universe, when things go off thetrack, knowing what to do, which
(18:04):
is like the definition of phronesis is what separates the
master from The Apprentice. And that after you've done it so
many times that you've wrestled with all the things that can go
off the track and all the ways to prevent it from going off the
track and, or to get it back on the track when it goes off that
way, that's where you've attained your phronesis and now
(18:28):
you know what to do. And so that's the kind of wisdom
that dies with the master. You know, when I was a
Goldsmith, my teacher, my, my man that I apprenticed with, he
had an apprentice with a maestroin Italy.
And he said when he was in Italyhe was going around and he met a
guy who did a type of enameling called plicojure.
(18:54):
And you know, most enameling, you have a little plate and you
put the little powdered glass onthere and you put it in the oven
and it melts the glass. And now you've got a little
metal plate with some nice colored glass melted into the
the little dish that the metal created.
But Plecasur, there's no bottom to that dish.
(19:17):
I don't even know how they do it, but the light goes through
'cause there's no bottom. And he said that this guy, this
maestro of Plecasur, could make a rose that if you held it out
at your hand, you could not tellthis was not a real rose until
you drill down on it. Now, the reason that I remember
(19:38):
this story is because he said that he immediately asked the
guy, do you have an apprentice that you're teaching this to?
And the master said, no, when I die, it dies with me.
It's like, wow, that's cold. You know, he could almost be a
Kung Fu master with that kind ofattitude, you know?
(20:02):
But there is this idea that suchthings aren't learned, but they
may be transmitted. If the vessel is sufficient to
the task, which is a tall order at times, you know.
And some masters are famous for not making it any easier.
(20:23):
Famous one is of Naropa or Mill Rapa rather.
Mill Rapa had a teacher named Marpa.
Marpa the translator. And Marpa put Mill Rapa through
hell before he gave him the transmission.
(20:46):
And the story is that it was to remove all this bad karma, that
he couldn't be a fit vessel for the transmission until he
removed all the karma. And they say he would make him
build these towers out of stone,and then he'd come.
He'd say, you what? It wasn't supposed to be built
here. It was supposed to be built over
here. Take it down, Bill, you know,
And he was fed very little and his body was covered with sores.
(21:08):
And apparently Marpa's wife would take mercy on him and give
him a little extra food or some kind of thing.
And Marpa, don't do that. Don't do that.
You're just going to make it take longer.
You're just going to make him suffer longer, you know, turn
the screws, you know. But anyway, so there is this
always this story about the master maybe putting us through
changes to make us a fit vessel for the dispositional shift that
(21:34):
needs to happen for us to be able to actually use this piece
of disembodied knowledge to actually bring it here and now,
you know? I think I want to go back to
something you said earlier aboutour our interest in meaning.
(21:56):
And maybe maybe I I, I want to ask first about how we relate
meaning to these two types of philosophy, Sophia and and
phronesis or the pursuit of Sophia and phronesis.
(22:20):
I don't know what the equivalentis.
So Sophieces. So, so yeah, how does how do you
think meaning relates to each ofthose?
I think they're fundamentally different.
I think that Sophia is the stuffthat reason can grasp.
(22:43):
And for example, I always have akind of a reaction when I hear
people complaining, usually froma kind of an arrogant position
of, you know, with a certain condescension to their
communication about how, oh, nobody uses reason.
(23:07):
Everybody should be more reasonable, you know, as if to
proclaim themselves to be reason, reasonable, rational,
the rational animal. And there's, and there's, it's
been given a lot of, you know, alot of kudos, you know, and it
seems like, well, duh. Well, right, I mean, it's, it's
(23:28):
kind of like a, a Western enlightenment value and has
resulted in a lot of good things, right.
And so, so I think that blinds us to its limitations.
And and it maybe we like to assume that that's how we
operate. Those of us who've been educated
(23:49):
and got a degree of some sort, we think now we are reasonable.
But I think if you drill down onthe human behavior, there's some
problems with that. The biggest problem is, you
know, traditionally what do we look at as the paradigm of
reason? I would argue geometry, which is
why Euclidean geometry gets set out.
(24:11):
That's why Spinoza gave his ethics laid out like geometry.
That's why that mathematical model has been taken as the the
way to make logical argument andbut but again, geometry is of as
(24:32):
Bergsen argues is a very extremecase scenario because it is that
clear. And I think I, I mentioned this
with Doctor Shapiro, that for the average human who gets up in
the morning and has to go do allthe human stuff, we, the things
(24:58):
about which we can be certain isvery limited.
Most of the certain things we can be certain about are not
really that relevant. They're presupposed, you know,
we, we, we, we're whether they're regardless of how
(25:18):
certain they are, I'm going to go, my car's going to start, the
generator is going to start. I'm going to go do whatever I'm
going to do. But it turns out that as far as
the things that start to form the decisions that we make about
what we're going to do, there are all these uncertainties.
(25:41):
And we can't run pure analyticalsyllogisms and have our
decisions be purely rational. Unless we admit that this type
of reason that we're using is not going to be the extreme case
scenario of reason as it shows up in geometry, but much more of
(26:03):
a down and dirty in the trenchestype of reason that deals with
probabilities and not certainties.
And the way that shows up is this other term that that came
up with grok in our conversation.
And that term is heuristics. And so I would argue that not
(26:25):
only are most people not rational, most of the time that
if they tried to be, they just wouldn't get a lot done.
You can't be rigorously scientific about every decision
that you have to make in your life.
Sometimes you just got to get the kids to school, you got to
(26:45):
get food on the table. You have to work with big
probabilities and you're runningoff of rules of thumb.
And sometimes those those rules of thumb run us afoul, but often
they're based on what I would argue are translogical
(27:10):
conclusions. And I say translogical because I
think they fall out of, they fall out of pattern recognition
combined with that sense that I've referred to before of that
human brain sense of coherence. And so our faculty works on
(27:36):
pattern and coherence in a way that generates us a tendency
towards certain rules of thumb at certain times.
And I don't think you're going to model that reasonably.
I I mean, unless you allow for this probability based reason
(27:58):
and you realize that your absolute reason only operates
with absolute facts. If your facts aren't absolute,
your reason gets fuzzier from there.
The more interpretive based yourfacts are, the more interpretive
base will be. You're translating your solution
(28:19):
into action in reality. And that's why I like to argue
that all our analytics happen ina context of interpretation.
We interpreted the problem to topose it analytically, and then
we interpreted the analytical solution to put it back into
reality. I got stuck a little bit on the
(28:43):
idea that Sophia or or the pursuit of wisdom satisfies the
rational faculties because I I think of the pursuit of wisdom
in some way also satisfying let's say psychological and
(29:06):
spiritual needs also. Well, I think that wisdom, yes,
but rational thought or reason no.
I think reason is based on. I thought you equated the the
Sophia. The Sofia is Time is timeless.
(29:28):
I don't think it needs to be scientifically verifiable.
I think it just needs to fit everyone at every time, more or
less. Maybe not even everyone, maybe
just have a certain universality, but I think it
could be a intangible, you know,it could be the truth behind
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, but I don't think you could call
(29:56):
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony purely rational.
I think that was the argument of, of Gerta and the Sherman
Drong people and every, everything that reacts against
rationalism says, well, there's meaning that goes, there's
meaning that goes beyond the territory of, of reason and
rational thought. Yeah, I, I studied music theory
(30:21):
in college and we analyzed pieces of music like that.
I don't think we did Beethoven'sFifth Symphony, but, but, but we
did other stuff like that. And at at no point did the
analysis attempt to answer what was great about the piece.
There was a lot of like what wasinteresting about it and what
(30:43):
was new or innovative about it and what was similar about it to
other forms and other other waysof using harmony and dissonance.
All of all of which questions are accessible by reason.
Yeah, right. But what we're after is it
should start to sound familiar to some folks.
(31:04):
What we're after is the qualia, right?
This is another version of the mind body problem.
How does the vibration in my earsteer my mind?
Why do some songs make me feel nostalgic and other songs make
me feel nationalistic and other songs just make me feel sad?
(31:24):
Well, that's, I mean, we're talking about vibrations in a
Sonic medium that hit the timpani and that that create an
electric and then, but then somewhere it translates into the
mind dimension and and we have that if we have that hard
problem back at us again. And yeah.
(31:46):
You want to go back to relating meaning to phronesis now because
you you talked about how it relates to Sophia, but I
wondered if you wanted to say more on the other Rd.
Well, I think that I think that phronesis is about that human
(32:07):
function of judgement. And I think that the root of
this is tangled up with my personal attitudes about free
will, You know, given all the different qualifications of of
how one defines that. And somewhere in that murky in
(32:30):
between zone of compatibilism, Ifind still a role for
significant free will. I'm surprised you're putting it
that mildly. Well, I, I I'm putting it that
mildly, because, you know, I've been also reading Cropotkin
lately and he's been disappointing me.
(32:54):
There, I said it. I expected better.
Awfully. Sort of, you know, it's
assumptions about human nature that I think a lot of us have
already experienced to not be true and making me wonder, well,
(33:17):
what was his experience like? And, and it seems like in some
sense he, he contradicts himselfby having, attributing to humans
diverse qualities or lacks of qualities based on his
convenience. And, but, but the root idea is
that there was this idea behind communism that is still there.
(33:43):
And that is that if the external, and this is because
they're materialists, OK, If theexternal circumstances were
right, then humans would act like angels.
It's like, yeah. But look at the people for whom
there's no material issues at all.
(34:04):
They act far from angels, but they're capitalists.
So. Yeah.
Yeah. But don't think that if we take,
and this is like Eddie Murphy's Trading places, right?
Don't think that if the places aren't traded, anybody won't act
like a capitalist or act like, you know what the other like
(34:25):
there. It says so.
So. But the idea is that for humans
to exhibit free will in spite ofall that stuff, some development
has to take place. They must have gone through
moral development to become ChunSU.
If we use Confucius terms like you have to win your free will.
(34:49):
That's interesting. That's a different approach to
free will than what I thought we've talked about before.
And if that's the case, no blame.
I mean, but, but we talked aboutfree will arising from the very
initiation of let's say the hermeneutical process, right?
(35:14):
The the asking the question of of you know, what is this?
Who am I? You know any any any of that
like the attempt before? That I would say that even
Husserl when he talks about thisidea of intentionality, that's
at the very beginning of consciousness, at the formation
(35:37):
of the eye, that some aspect of free will is manifested in
moving towards the universe fromthe inner world.
That that's what why the baby reaches out.
I would say people tell them that's instinct.
I'd say, well then that amount of free will is instinctive, but
(35:59):
it's a developmental capacity ismy point, I guess.
So that you could say, yeah, anyhuman being has a rudimentary
capacities for free will, but that to develop that through the
stage of consciousness, conscious of consciousness as
we've referred to, that some effort must be exerted.
(36:20):
And that's one of the things that I think the the
philosophers agree on. I think Aristotle agrees on
that. I think Confucius agrees on
that. And that and, and some of them
tell you quite unabashedly, you're going to need an exemplar
for this or what Grok started calling a pronemus the in that
(36:50):
teach or a phronemus in that phronesis is different than
normal learning where you have ateacher.
The the teacher of phronesis hasto be an exemplar.
They have to be running the process for you to absorb it in
(37:11):
a certain way. And that's we, we use, try to
use the word transmission, but it's, it's involved with them
manifesting the disposition thatthat dispositional knowledge is
based on the Zen archery master.He's got to be able to pick up
the bow and hit the target right.
(37:32):
And so, so, so that that idea that there is a developmental
process there and that we win our free will just like we win
our consciousness of our consciousness.
It's certainly within our capacity, I guess to not develop
that, although maybe maybe there's a question there.
(37:55):
I would say that there is a typeof gravitation maybe that pulls
us to that, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have to be
developed. It's within your capacity to
walk, but you still had to fall on your ass a lot in your face a
few times, and you still had to,you know, stretch those wings
before you could just fly. That's, that's another example
(38:18):
of compatibilism, which I which I think is doing a lot of heavy
lifting in our cognitive model. And so I'm glad that we're
starting to use that word and refer to it because like another
way of thinking about compatibilism is that we have
these paradoxes like, like we have to develop free will, but
(38:44):
there's also gravity behind it. Or, or all of the material
aspects that contribute to free will or, or contribute to our
decisions negate the idea of free will.
And yet the immaterial aspects of free will might support it or
(39:12):
demonstrate it or, or illustrateit.
So, so yeah, I'm kind of thinking that like how we work
with these paradoxes is compatibilism.
Yep. And, and, and that's going to
have to be my, a component of myanswer to Professor Wolf also
(39:38):
about how could synchronicity exist in a material world.
I, I think the answer is they'recompatible because they, well,
I, I won't say because they're compatible and I'll finish that
thought another time. So so I'm I just want to wanted
to comment on. Compatibility.
(39:59):
Now see, I always think of and what you were talking about, I
always think of or not always, but I often think of the baby
bird. And I think I've seen some of
these nature shows, you know, David Attenborough and and
there's the baby Raptor of some kind and he's standing on the
edge. And of course, his parents have
(40:19):
built this nest. Not where there's a nice easy
walking trail nearby. They built it on this friggin
Cliff. So his first step out of his
nest is, you know, he's never flown.
He's up on this Cliff. It's hard for me to believe that
(40:40):
within his little bird experience, at some point he
just has to exert. I have to call it free will when
he jumps because you can see he's wrestling with it.
It does not seem like a good idea and yet he jumps.
(41:00):
Now some would argue that that'sexactly shows there wasn't free
will there, but I would argue hewouldn't have paused and looked
down and gulped the way he did if he didn't have to have some
free will involved. But life.
Will an argument against free will.
And but that life won't go on without him leaping.
(41:22):
Yeah, right. His life as an eagle or as a
whatever. But he he won't ever soar if he
doesn't leap. And yes, it is within his
Aristotelian and Teleki what it is to be him is to soar.
But I still argue that relies onhim exerting his free will to be
(41:43):
a one of those. And that there, that's that
glove meets hand nature. So yes, it's nature's will, but
it's nature's will that it be his will.
Yeah, right. Yeah.
So anyway, I always think that'sa great little example.
That explanation, and it's it's fractal nature resonates just
(42:06):
because meaning nested in meaning nested in meaning is I
guess, my subjective experience of what we're dealing with here.
Yeah. I mean, that's what it feels
like. So that yes, it's about your
personal expression, and it's about your personal expression
(42:27):
being the expression that the universal mind was thinking when
it thought you up. Yeah, basically what Spinoza was
saying about the the human, you know, the individual human
freedom is an expression of nature and and human happiness
(42:55):
results from alignment between the expression and what what
nature might want expressed most.
And I, and I think he was in thenot free will camp Despite that.
Right. Yeah, yeah.
And and again, that word happiness, that's a trouble.
(43:16):
Term. Well, that was my topic for
today. So maybe that segue because I
was. Thinking a duck come down now,
yeah. Yeah, right.
So, so we talked with Professor Larry about kind of his focus on
on three big questions, consciousness, free will and
(43:38):
happiness. And when we were talking about
it, I had this sense of like oneof these things is not like the
other. And, and I've been thinking
about what was it about happiness that felt
categorically different to me than the other two.
And I think it was that there's not 2 camps about happiness.
It's not like, well, free will or not free will or one nests in
(44:01):
the other and it's turtles all the way down or and, and
consciousness either arises frommatter or matter arises from
consciousness. But there's kind of like these
binaries. Happiness is like this whole
different thing. Oh my God, You've got the
chocolate people, you've got thetrout fishermen, you've got the
(44:22):
skydivers. I mean, wow.
Yeah, and you've got Spinoza andAristotle and.
Schopenhauer. Who's going to probably say
there is no such thing? I don't know.
It's one of those, yeah. So so yeah, I mean, I I was, I
(44:42):
was going to kind of float that difference past you and and just
say, you know, this, this strikes me as a fundamentally
different question. Where where free will and and
consciousness we can think abouta lot.
Ultimately we're going to pick aside.
Maybe we'll switch sides, whatever, but it's but happiness
is like this thing to maybe perpetually unpack, you know?
(45:09):
Well, you can answer the questions on consciousness and
free will, and if you can get a good answer, you can pack it
right into the realm of Sophia. And that's what we're trying to
do. Which is why they always want to
publish, right? And when you publish, it's very
important that if people can argue and disprove you, if it's
falsifiable and all that stuff. But happiness?
(45:32):
Happiness is phonetic, baby. Yeah, yeah.
It makes sense that it would have come up in this
conversation. Because when people ask you,
when people are pursuing happiness, what do they want to
know? What do I do?
Well, that's where the rubber meets the road.
Always. When it comes down to what do I
(45:52):
do, they don't really. You don't help them much if you
just give them a definition of happiness, unless it's got some
instructions that go along with it.
Maybe let's start this by following the meaning thread and
the relationship between happiness and meaning.
And, and there's a debate that goes on in my household about
(46:15):
the relative merits of non attachment versus intensive
attachment and how how meaning might result from loving people
and grieving people and maybe even loving ideas and and
curiosity or, you know, but but like being attached to phronesis
(46:40):
to doing in some way. And non attachment maybe relates
through phronesis, meaning to Sophia.
By practicing non attachment, weattain the higher principles,
(47:01):
but we have to practice, we haveto do to to get there.
So there's like a a little complexity.
Because I think that that's where this idea of controlled
folly comes in. It's because, you know, we want
to act as if it all matters, while remaining confident that
whatever happens, it all works out in the end.
(47:24):
We talked about living with passion, living without passion,
right? Right.
Yeah. And that and that, you know, and
also that at some level, you know, I think when we were
talking about Ibn al Farabi, we were talking about this idea
that when act, when accurately perceived, even punishment is
(47:48):
sweet. Yeah.
And meaning, meaning not corporeal punishment in the
contingent world, but even cosmic punishment for at the
hand of the creator is still sweet.
And you know, which is in the, in the yogic traditions, they
will sometimes say that, you know, if you're really seeing
things on the highest level, what you're seeing is, is called
(48:12):
Satchit Ananda, which is being consciousness bliss, you know,
which is that, you know, I wouldargue this is the direction of
Spinoza's sub eternitatus, you know, subspecies eternitatus,
that you're seeing things from the, from the God's eye view.
(48:34):
You know which, which I mean, we've, we've talked about this
and we've seen different people try to approach that idea of
leaving our personal perspectivebehind.
Whether it's a phenomenologist saying we have to bracket or
it's Jane Cox saying you got to pull your foot up from the nail
or it's the Buddhist saying the great way is not difficult for
(48:58):
those who do not pick and choose.
So there is this. And this is, you know, probably
where the Zen Master should hit you with a stick.
Because, yeah, you do operate asif it matters within a setting
of knowing that everything is fine and nothing really matters.
(49:24):
Just like Queen tells us today'sRock'n'roll reference.
I thought it was going to be making this is a warm gun.
I I was waiting like we got the chocolate people, we got the
gun, warm gun people. OK, yeah, no, I was it to the
end of after using the warm gun,right?
And Mama just killed a man. Queen reference.
(49:46):
Yeah. And then I that's the way it
ends, right? Nothing really matters.
And and that's what that's what,that's what Krishna tells Arjuna
in some level that, you know, the Slayer who thinks he is
slain is mistaken and the slayeewho thinks he has been slain is
also mistaken. And that and that's this idea of
(50:10):
that what's really happening here is a theater of mind and
that the real process. And we've had philosophers now I
think from both sides of this argument saying that what's
really going on here is mind andothers saying no, it's really
going on here is matter. And we haven't actually done the
(50:33):
bear and bull baiting with them.You know that old British sport
where you chain a bear to a bulland then you bet, right.
But those are two major as we'veas we come back regularly to
those are the two major ideas. And so so yeah, I mean, where do
(50:54):
we go with that? It always comes down to me to
what do we do? But I'm a pragmatic American.
Well, let's go back to let's go back to happiness.
Up about certainty so with so with happiness, I mean, to me
the idea of that we're going to strive for scientific certainty
around the topic of happiness. It has has its own philosophical
(51:17):
issues written right into the script.
See for me, happiness is is A2 dimensional mapping is it's not
even it would be like saying this is the map of Norway and
giving you a rectangle. We've really had to lose a lot
of detail here, like all of it. I'm not even sure what that
(51:42):
rectangle would comprise, because again, to your point,
there's the chocolate people andthen there's the like the.
Well, there's the hedonists. Yeah, and.
There's the idealists. And, and we'd like to believe
that there's, or I would like tobelieve, I guess that there's a
(52:03):
difference in quality between the happiness that each of these
groups is experiencing. Not that well, that's.
Reprising Aristotle, Aristotle went ran through them and came
away with this idea that, you know, we want to generate the
the good life. And I guess as much as I sort of
(52:24):
repel the idea in this sense, I guess I am kind of Aristotelian,
because I do think that your ultimate, when I translate
happiness, I want to make a capital H, I want it to be
cosmic. I don't just want you to get a
good brownie every once in a while and say that's happiness.
(52:46):
That's too low a bar for me. I want to say that that
happiness, as in capital H, happiness is in the fulfillment
of what it is to be you. And that's frenetic.
You're going to have to go through a lifetime of warmer,
(53:07):
warmer, cooler, cooler. I think I got this piece.
OK. What's the next piece?
Warmer, warmer, cooler, cool. Damn.
You know, like, there's a whole soundtrack to that, that that is
a it is a here. There's a word in here,
(53:29):
phonetogenic. How's that?
Phronesis with the the generate the generative component
phronogenic process that's better than a chronosyn classic
(53:50):
infundibulum. Yeah.
So, so I mean, so that refers tothe act of doing, informing the
quality of doing. It's kind of it's like applying
A hermeneutical process to doing.
And that's the warmer, warmer, colder, colder.
Back to the whole, Look at the part.
(54:11):
Back to the whole, look at the part.
Get a whole new piece. Have to re update the whole
picture of the whole. Maybe it's not about Pokémon,
right? I mean, this is a stage of
development. I haven't tried that.
I don't know, maybe right. I've tried chocolate.
(54:32):
There was a hard there was a time in my household where
Charizard was a was a a thing that wielded a certain amount of
mental leverage. I, I, I remember those days in
your house. I when that was going on in my
house, I turned the hearing aid all the way down.
(54:52):
I yeah, I I just didn't understand I.
I understand that. So.
Although Charizard's kind of cool you.
Know maybe maybe ending on a personal note because it might,
might be useful. And I'm wondering, maybe I want
to ask you, like, how has your relationship to happiness
(55:17):
changed through your own Frodo Genesis from No Genesis?
Yeah, I would say that I'm relating a lot more to that,
that musician who was in his 90sand he was still practicing
every day and they asked him whyand he said because he's still
(55:39):
making progress. That for me, in the broadest
sense, happiness is tied up withthis idea of making progress.
You know, there's this, there's this Chinese saying that I can't
remember the Chinese, but it basically says that, you know,
(56:00):
you have your place on the horizon where you're headed, but
you're stepping over the branch that's laying across your path
at your feet. And so, and to me, that's like
the piece of the whole referencealso, where am I going?
What am I doing today to get there?
And maybe I don't see the place on the horizon.
(56:24):
Maybe that's part of what's achieved by stepping over the
things, you know, because this is that meeting of the two
worlds. I'm, I'm in the contingent world
of bathrooms and restaurants as Yoshi Sasaki Roshi would say.
But the thing that I'm after is really kind of transcendent,
(56:47):
meaning that it's not going to happen as a result of the stuff
that you see and can bang into in the contingent world.
It's going to happen through it.Like the like the pre birth
world shines through the post birth world, like 1's soul
(57:07):
shines through one's body. So, so, so I think that's the
way that I've related it and, and it's changed.
It's really changed over the years.
So for example, I, like many people, did feel that there were
certain things that I needed to be happy.
(57:30):
And then, like many people, I realized that there was very
little likelihood of me attaining some of those things,
and so I best not define happiness in terms of those.
(57:50):
I'm I'm thinking of Jordan Peterson's Clean Your Room as a
kind of parallel philosophy. Well, there is something to
attaining a state of balance andI think it's particularly
(58:11):
challenging in this world. And that that balance shows up a
bunch of different ways. It shows up in, you know, some
of the important ways are how your time is spent.
So for example, I've been thinking lately about different
(58:35):
people's lives being mixes of social interaction and solitude,
because I'm somebody that has more of the solitude end of the
spectrum than I think the average person.
And to me, it's quite clear the price that's paid for that.
(58:57):
So for me, an important part of my happiness, in fact a part of
me becoming who I am, I had a ona better level relied on me
being able to tune that because too much of A social environment
would not allow me to go throughthe process that I needed to go
(59:19):
through to manifest aspects of myself that seemed to want to
unfold like that. And so, you know, there is this
idea maybe that if people are inthis hermetic, you know,
direction, that there is a misogyny behind that or a
(59:41):
misanthropy behind it or a rejection of the world because
of its contamination. And I, and I think that it's
maybe you could say that there'ssome of the, you know, the
Taoists or the, the, the, the Buddhists sometimes refer to
that as the worrying of the cicadas is the buzz of the, of
(01:00:04):
the world of social interaction and, you know, constant
interplay. And that is what hermits are
typically getting away from, butthey're not that That isn't the
primary motivation. It isn't that that's bad in
(01:00:24):
itself, it's just that that obstructs the process of this
other thing that is a positive motivation.
So it's like at Christmas when you open up a present, it's not
that the paper is bad that it was wrapped in, but you still
want to get the paper off of there because it's it's in the
(01:00:46):
way of the thing. So value judgement about the
paper. It served its purpose Maybe, but
but it's in the way of the thingright now.
Well, and and as someone who whois likewise inclined towards
solitude, just to just to put put a finer point on it, there
(01:01:09):
is a balance and that balance isdifferent for different people.
And different chapters. And and a different chapters and
and. Some people really derive great
meaning from their social interactions, and the expression
of parts of themselves occurs through that more than through
(01:01:31):
solitude. Yep, Yep, and it's different
through different chapters. Very much so.
None of this applied to me in myearlier chapters, and sometimes
just for purely logistical reasons, but but often it had to
do because my mental process wasvery much involved with the
(01:01:52):
collective. And now it's more removed from
that which which I think is a process of age that comes along
with the perspective that comes with age.
And you realize how certain motivating influences were very
much chapter based and that it'sOK to be motivated.
(01:02:14):
In fact, you see people that arestill motivated by those things
from that chapter, and it feels a little wrong somehow, a little
misfitting to still be motivatedabout those things that were so
clearly from previous chapters. I think we can all think of
those, you know, without me having to draw the bloody
(01:02:35):
details. Yeah, But you know, it also has
to do with, I think I we talked about this before.
It's like, how is your life going to graph out?
Are you on a curve that peaks early and then does the slow
slide all the way down? Are you on the curve that, you
(01:02:55):
know, peak somewhere in the middle, holds it for a while and
then slides down? Or are you on the curve that
just builds and builds and builds and builds so that at 90
you're still making progress? Did you ever see that video of
Kurt Vonnegut talking about the basic story arcs that you can
use as an author? Oh, no.
(01:03:17):
But it sounds familiar. It's brilliant.
Oh. And you're reminding me of it.
Those are like the three options.
Oh, oh, interesting. Interesting because because in
life those are really the options.
And we have plenty of people outthere as paradigms of all three,
I think, but unfortunately less of the third.
(01:03:40):
I think the one that's up and tothe right might be the one that
he says don't write that story. It's boring, right?
It's like to great life. It's not a good book.
I think. If I remember correctly.
Where you just where it just slowly builds and builds and
builds and builds. Yeah, I think that's right.
I think those the stories all come after the posthumously.
(01:04:03):
Yeah, yeah, it's the opposite ofJames Dean.
Yeah, sure. Yeah, cool.
Well, maybe let's leave it there.
I, I think we'll come back to phronogenesis that I, we, we
might need something a little catchier, but yeah.
Reminds me of so far. We've got Phronymos for the
(01:04:25):
person that is. The album name, you know.
Really. And phronetics, which is, you
know, I searched that, there's nothing there.
He'd always gets mistaken for phonetics, phonisiology as the
(01:04:46):
pedagogy of phonet of phonisis. And I don't know, maybe I'll.
Maybe I'll pester grok and see if it has some other good terms
it can cook up for us. We better buy some domain names
before this episode releases. Oh, there we go.
(01:05:09):
Cool. Thanks, Brian.
Sounds good. See everybody next time.
Oh, I did want to say we crossedthe line for 80 subscribers at
the time of recording this. So that leaves us only 990.
Wow, wow, you do the math. But anyway, we love you all,
every one of you. Keep it up.
(01:05:30):
Thank you. Bye bye.
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